Despite reports that the English launch of Samsung’s Bixby has been delayed, it looks like Samsung will push forward in its efforts to make Bixby a true competitor to Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
The Wall Street Journal reports that these efforts will see the company bring a wireless speaker to market in the same vein as Google Home or Amazon’s Echo.
Said to be codenamed “Vega”, little else is known about the speaker other than that it will compete pretty directly with the above, as well as Microsoft’s own Invoke speaker and Apple’s HomePod.
Of course, Samsung still has to get Bixby off the ground first. The voice assistant launched in South Korea back in May. However, the English version has faced several delays. Some as recently as this week.
“Developing Bixby in other languages is taking more time than we expected mainly because of the lack of the accumulation of big data,” a Samsung spokesperson told The Korea Herald.
As such, it’s difficult to imagine a Bixby speaker being announced – let alone released – until 2018 at the earliest.
